ENTERTAINMENT NEWS - Antjie Krog’s volume of poetry Plunder has been awarded the Helgaard Steyn Award for Literature for 2024, with prize money of R675,000.
The Helgaard Steyn Award has been awarded annually to South African artists since 1987 – alternately to a painter, writer, sculptor, or composer.
This is only the second time in the history of the Helgaard Steyn Award for Literature that the winning work is a volume of poetry. Breyten Breytenbach won it in 1996 with Nege landskappe van ons tye bemaak aan ’n beminde. It is also only the second time that a woman has received the literature prize.
It was jointly awarded to Marlene van Niekerk for Agaat and Hermann Giliomee for Die Afrikaners in 2008.
Afrikaans works – fiction or non-fiction – published between 2020 and 2023 in a print run of at least 300 copies were eligible for the prize.
Along with Plunder on the shortlist were the novels Decima (Eben Venter), Gebeente (Etienne van Heerden), Dinge van ’n hond (S.P. Benjamin), and Van vaders en vlugtelinge (S.J. Naudé), as well as Naudé’s short story collection Dol heuning.
When Krog heard about the prize, she responded as follows: “To be noticed by the gods for a moment! That’s when a poet receives an award with monetary value?.?.?. It is currently beyond my ability to describe the extensive effect of such a great (and deeply Free State-rooted) honour in terms of your survival at an old age as a poet?.?.?.”
Prof. Henning Pieterse from the University of the Free State, convener of the panel, writes in the commendation: “A hallmark of a great writer – a poet, in this case – is that he/she delves deeper and renews himself/herself with and through each book or collection. And this is precisely what Krog does with her latest volume of poems: She revisits various aspects of her oeuvre, makes them new, and ‘speaks’ with an increasingly stronger voice to the reader.”
The other panel members were Prof. Thys Human (North-West University) and Ms. Valda Jansen.
“Within the context of extremely strong competition, it was a privilege for the judges to announce Plunder as the winner of the Helgaard Steyn Prize for Literature for 2024,” says Pieterse.
Plunder, published in 2022 by Human & Rousseau in the year Krog turned 70, was awarded the Hertzog Prize and the Afrikaans UJ Prize for creative work in 2023.
“Read from the title, the poet ‘pillages’ her own and other poets’ and writers’ work, but the ‘pillage’ theme is further broadened to the dismantling of the aging body by time and the destruction of the land and the earth as a whole by humans – on political and ecological levels,” reads the commendation.
Further recipients of the literature prize include: Karel Schoeman for ’n Ander land (1988); John Miles for Kroniek uit die doofpot (1992); John Kannemeyer for Leipoldt: ’n Lewensverhaal (2000); Dan Sleigh for Eilande (2004); P.G. du Plessis for Fees van die ongenooides (2012); Willem Anker for Buys (2016); and Lodewyk G. du Plessis for Die dao van Daan van der Walt (2020).
The prize is awarded by the Helgaard Steyn Trust, which was established from the estate of Dr. Jan Steyn, during his lifetime a diplomat, farmer, and company director, who named the trust after his father.
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